There have been a great many explanations, some of them very complicated, of the great dem
Forty years ago, when the parents of today's high-school seniors were themselves in school, a high-school education was enough to get ready for most occupations, and, for those occupations, job training took place either in the high school or on the job. A college degree was necessary only for those who wanted to be ministers, doctors, or lawyers, high school teachers, scientists, or scholars. Today most jobs that offer opportunity for growth and advancement are open only to college graduates, for colleges have assumed the task of offering the specific preparation that is needed. There is very little job training in high schools today. Instead they concentrate on preparing students for college.
What has happened is that, as business, industry, government, and the professions have expanded, they have developed a need for many varieties of specialists. Colleges and universities, responding to these developments, have organized new programs of study to train these specialists, and in turn these new programs draw students who would not have gone to college forty years ago.
For example, almost all of the college programs in business and commerce have developed and the more advanced programs in agriculture and home economics. And there is a long list of other offerings that were not available except in a few experimental programs. Accounting, social science, various forms of administration, public hospital and public health medical technology, and advanced nurses training have been developed in higher education within those same forty years. And as evidence that the process is still continuing, we can see the emergence of atomic technology, unclear engineering, computer technology, and, most recently, international administration.
In Paragraph 1, the word "consumers" most probably refers to______.
A.high-school graduates
B.college graduates
C.those who employ college graduates
D.those who consume commercial goods